I try to log my observing and related activities in a regular blog - sometimes there will be a delay but I usually catch up. An index of all my blogs is on the main menu at the top of the page with daily, weekly or monthly views. My Twitter feed is below. I am also interested in photograping wildlife when I can and there is a menu option above to look at some of my images. I try to keep the news feeds from relevant astronomical sources up to date and you will need to scroll down to find these.

The Celestron 14 is mounted on a Paramount ME that I have been using for about 10 years now - you can see that it is mounted on a tripod so is a portable set up. I still manage to transport it on my own and set it all up even though I have just turned 70! It will run for hours centering galaxies in the 12 minute field even when tripod mounted.

On Saturday 13th April 2019 the Moon moved across the Open Cluster Messier 44. The animation below shows the Moon occulting two of the M44 stars as it moves from West to East. The exposure time for each image was 0.05 seconds or 1/20th second. The time each 0.05s exposure started is shown at the bottom of the screen. There is roughly 7 seconds between each exposure. The two close stars pop out of view behind the Moon in sequential frames. An earlier (single) occultation is shown in the previous posting.

At 0015 this morning (13th April 2019) I imaged the near opposition Minor planet 7 Iris as it approched the asterism known as "The Stargate". The LRGB images consists of 5 X 20 second Luminance images and 3 x 20 second images for each of the Red , Green and Blue filters. The negative image gives the details. "The Stargate" in also known as Struve 1659. Earlier I had imaged M81 and M82 in Ursa Major .

After imaging the Minor Planet Pallas this morning I pointed the telescope at Caldwell 27, the Crescent Nebula. It started to get windy so I limited the imaging to 4 minutes Luminance, 2 Minutes each Red, Green, Blue and H Alpha.